Nokia on Wednesday lowered its outlook for the first quarter of 2012, noting that performance from its devices and services division will have a greater negative impact on its quarter than previously expected. “Our disappointing Devices & Services first quarter 2012 financial results and outlook for the second quarter 2012 illustrates that our Devices & Services business continues to be in the midst of transition,” Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said. “Within our Smart Devices business unit, we have established early momentum with Lumia, and we are increasing our investments in Lumia to achieve market success. Our operator and distributor partners are providing solid support for Windows Phone as a third ecosystem, as evidenced most recently by the launch of the Lumia 900 by AT&T in the United States.” While the Finnish vendor continued to struggle in the first quarter, it did confirm that Lumia phone sales through the end of March topped 2 million units. Nokia’s press release follows below. More →

T-Mobile on Wednesday reported earnings for the company’s holiday quarter, which saw the carrier lose 802,000 customers causing revenue to drop 3.3% to $20.6 billion. The Deutsche Telekom-owned company is the only major U.S. carrier that does not carry Apple’s iPhone, which it blames for the defections, however T-Mobile is looking to bounce back with the launch of a 4G LTE network in 2013. “Though we are not satisfied with the contract customer losses and the decreased total revenues, the quarterly margin improvement year-on-year was impressive,” said CEO of Deutsche Telekom René Obermann. “The spectrum gained through the break-up fee empowers T-Mobile USA to start LTE-based services in key US markets and strengthens its competitiveness.” The company is the last major U.S. carrier to announce plans for an LTE network, with Verizon and AT&T already offering the service and Sprint preparing to launch its new network this year. Read on for T-Mobile’s press release. More →

Nintendo recently published a note in which it said it will report an annual operating loss of 45 billion yen ($575 million) for the December quarter. Analysts had expected the Japan-based gaming giant to report a 4.2 billion yen loss, Reuters said Thursday. The company now expects to ship 10 million Wii consoles, instead of the original 12 million projected, and 14 million units of its portable 3DS gaming consoles, down from 16 million units. “We had higher expectations for the year-end season, but failed to meet them,” President Satoru Iwata said while speaking to press in Osaka, Japan. Three analysts speaking to Reuters all agreed that Nintendo needs to rethink its strategy and understand that consoles could be a thing of the past. “Their time of growth [from console systems] is over, and, while I don’t think the company will cease to exist, if they don’t move into new categories, they will no doubt lose the great scale they’ve amassed,” Mitsushige Akino, chief fund manager at Ichiyoshi Investment Management in Tokyo, told Reuters. Satoru Iwata has previously said that creating games for Apple’s iOS mobile platform is “absolutely not under consideration.” More →

Sony on Wednesday lowered its full-year guidance from its earlier forecast of a 60 billion yen profit to a 90 billion yen loss following second fiscal quarter earnings that missed projections. Sony was surprised by a 27 billion yen loss in its September quarter compared to a 31 billion-yen profit in the same quarter last year, prompting the struggling electronics giant to slash sales targets for annual sales targets for flat panel televisions, PCs and cameras. Sony now estimates that it will sell 20 million TVs during the current fiscal year, down from its earlier estimate of 22 million units. The company attributes the sales decline to “unfavorable foreign exchange rates and lower LCD television sales,” among other factors. Shares of Sony stock were down 6% on Tuesday ahead of the company’s earnings report, and the stock is down nearly 50% this year. More →

Shares of Netflix stock plummeted more than 27% in after-hours trading as the company revealed it lost more than 800,000 customers in the third quarter. Netflix now serves 23.8 million total customers and it reported third-quarter revenue of $822 million, beating estimates of $812 million. Earnings worked out to $1.16 per share, which also beat Wall Street’s consensus of $0.96. “While we dramatically improved our $7.99 unlimited streaming service by embracing new platforms, simplifying user-interface, and more than doubling domestic spending on streaming content over 2010, we greatly upset many domestic Netflix members with our significant DVD-related pricing changes, and to a lesser degree, with the proposed-and-now-cancelled rebranding of our DVD service,” Netflix said in a letter to shareholders Monday. Netflix expects DVD shipments to decline sharply during the fourth quarter, a continuation of the company’s earlier changes, but it expects growth in weekly gross additions compared to the December quarter last year. The company said it expects global consolidated income to fall between $19 million and $37 million during the fourth quarter and EPS is expected to land between $0.36 and $0.70. More →

Microsoft has lost $5.5 billion, an average drain of $1 billion per quarter, on Bing since it introduced the search engine in 2009, CNNMoney reported on Wednesday. Despite the losses, Microsoft’s Bing reached a 30% share of the U.S. search engine market in April of this year, slowly narrowing the gap with Google, although comScore’s figures pin the search engine’s share at just 14.7%. Despite the constant drain, Microsoft still has a plan for Bing. During the company’s financial analyst meeting in California recently, Microsoft’s president of online services Qi Lu said his company hopes to use Bing to “reorganize the web” to “change the game fundamentally” instead of taking on Google in a head-to-head dogfight. Read on for more. More →

T-Mobile USA reported its second quarter results on Thursday and noted that it lost 50,000 subscribers during the quarter. That’s a drop, but it’s not as bad as the 93,000 customers the carrier lost during the year ago quarter or the 99,000 customers who left during the first quarter. T-Mobile also recorded $5.1 billion in revenue for the second quarter, down from the $5.2 billion it reported during the first quarter and the $5.4 billion in revenue it pulled in during the same quarter last year. Blended churn, which includes both prepaid and contract customers, was 3.3%. That’s down from the 3.4% reported last quarter. “The United States remains a difficult market for Deutsche Telekom, but we see improvements compared to the first quarter of 2011,” René Obermann, CEO of Deutsche Telekom said. “T-Mobile USA will continue its strategy with the extended HSPA+ 42 coverage and continued data growth.” Read on for the full press release. More →

Sony reported its fiscal first quarter results on Thursday and recorded a net loss of 15.5 billion Yen ($198.7 million). The company attributed the loss to the earthquake that struck off the coast of Japan in March, as well as a “stagnate” economy in the United States and Europe. Sony’s operating profits were 27.5 billion Yen ($330 million), down from the 67.02 billion Yen ($862) it reported during the same quarter last year. Operating revenue was 1.49 trillion Yen ($19.1 billion), down 10% from the 1.66 trillion ($21.3 billion) in revenue Sony reported in the first fiscal quarter of 2011. “We think we can be profitable at the current exchange rate levels,” Sony’s chief financial officer Masaru Kato said during a recent news conference. “We had almost no negative impact from the dollar, but the euro is still an issue for us.” Kato said that “TVs are one of the only remaining issues,” for the company and noted that Sony expects to sell 22 million televisions this year, down from the original projection of 27 million units. Kato said Sony’s supply chain was hit hard by the earthquake and impacted the company’s sales during the first quarter but that the supply channels have already bounced back.

Sony Ericsson on Friday posted a net loss of €50 million in the second quarter of 2011, blaming supply constraints resulting from devastating earthquakes that shook Japan earlier this year for the difficult quarter. The steep loss was not expected by the Street, and it is down from a profit of €12 million in the second quarter of 2010 and €11 million last quarter. Sony Ericsson’s shipments fell 31% from the same quarter last year to just 7.6 million units, while analysts expected shipments ranging from 8 million to 11 million handsets. Revenue for the quarter totalled €1.19 billion, down from €1.76 billion in the same quarter a year prior. “Sony Ericsson’s second quarter profitability was affected by the March 11 earthquake in Japan. We estimate that the impact of earthquake-related supply chain constraints on our portfolio was close to 1.5 million units, with most of the effect in the early part of the quarter,” said Sony Ericsson President and CEO Bert Nordberg in a statement. “Our shift to Android-based smartphones continues with smartphone sales accounting for more than 70 percent of our total sales during the quarter. We have shipped more than 16 million Xperia smartphones to date. We have introduced eight new Xperia smartphones this year and we continue to see strong consumer and operator demand across the Xperia smartphone portfolio.” The struggling phone vendor did say it expects business to improve in the second half of 2011, and it forecasts modest industry growth for the full year. Sony Ericsson said is share of the global Android smartphone market during the second quarter roughly 11%. The company’s full press release follows below. More →

Sony Chief Financial Officer Masaru Kato announced to the press on Monday that the company expects to post an annual loss of $3.2 billion for its fiscal year ending in March 2011 — the second largest loss in company history. The news comes as yet another blow for the Japanese consumer electronics giant, whose online networks have been the target of a series of cyberattacks that impacted more than 100 million customers. Sony had previously expected to post a profit this year, however the company had to write off $4.4 billion for a tax credit from a previous quarter. A series of earthquakes that rocked Japan earlier this year had a negative impact on the company as well, slowing production and destroying factories. The affect of the quakes carried over to the company’s first quarter, Kato told the press, but Sony is still optimistic about 2011/2012. For the fiscal year ending in March 2012, Sony expects to post an operating profit of 200 billion yen, or $2.45 billion at today’s exchange rate. More →

Moments ago, Sprint released its earnings report card for the first quarter of 2011, and things are definitely improving. The company saw its largest increase in wireless customers in the last five years, adding 1.1 million subscribers across all Sprint brands — prepaid net additions totaled 846,000 lines and postpaid adds totaled 310,000 lines. The company also saw a spike in revenue and ARPU. Sprint posted revenues of $8.3 billion, up 3% year-over-year, and ARPU jump $1 year-over-year to $56. The company also noted its postpaid churn rate or 1.81 — down from 2.54 one year ago. The nation’s third largest carrier still posted a $439 million loss — a diluted loss per share of $0.15 — so you can’t really call the quarter a success. “We’ve added two million wireless subscribers over the past two quarters,” said company CEO, Dan Hesse. “In spite of Verizon’s iPhone launch and aggressive competitive responses to it, our simple and unlimited plans, 4G leadership, strong customer service, and successful multi-brand strategy drove solid Sprint performance for the quarter.” The link to Sprint’s full earnings statement is after the break. More →

The fourth quarter of 2010 — the busy holiday quarter — was not all that fruitful for the U.S.’s forth largest wireless provider. In an earnings call today, T-Mobile posted a nearly flat revenue number — $4.69 billion in Q4 2010 versus $4.71 billion in Q3 of 2010, and $4.65 billion in Q4 of 2009 — and less than stellar customer retention numbers. T-Mo saw net losses of 318,000 customers in Q4, along with a churn rate rising from 3.4% in Q3 to 3.6%. One bright spot on the company’s balance sheet is the 25% jump in “data services revenue” year-over-year.

“I am pleased with the increase in smartphone adoption and our ongoing improvement in data ARPU. Data growth in the U.S. mobile market continues to accelerate and with the largest 4G network T-Mobile USA is well-positioned to differentiate itself and grow consumer usage,” said René Obermann, CEO of Deutsche Telekom. “We are not satisfied with contract churn, but we expect that the measures presented at the T-Mobile USA Investor Day in January will lead to improvements in 2011.”

Try as it may, 2010 is a year that LG Electronics will not soon forget. The struggling electronics giant on Wednesday reported its fourth quarter earnings and put the cap on its worst year on record. The company posted a fourth-quarter net loss of 256.4 trillion won compared to profits of 361.9 billion won in the fourth quarter of 2009. Operating profit for the full year was down 93% to 176.4 billion won. Revenue from cell phones dropped 15% as LG’s mobile division posted a 274.1 billion won loss. Shipments were also down 10% to 30.6 million units, pushing LG into the No. 5 spot globally behind RIM. The company will look to new high-end smartphones like the Optimus 2X, Optimus Black and Optimus 3D as it attempts to reverse its declining mobile trend. LG remains the No. 2 TV company globally, as sales in its home entertainment division increased 15.8% compared to the third quarter of this year. Because competition forced LG to drop the average selling price on its television sets, however, the company’s home entertainment business still posted an operating loss in the quarter. Hit the break for LG’s full press release. More →